"Many companies standardized on Windows NT and Office 97 as their corporate personal computing environment for good reasons. Windows NT 4.0 was touted (by Microsoft) as the most stable, secure OS available. And Office 97 was described as a quantum leap ahead of its predecessors (and competitors). But it's been six years, and many environments are in dire need of a face-lift." Read the article at ZDNet.

In the third part of our Penguin Shootout series, Timothy R. Butler considers the latest distribution from the best-known name in the sector - Red Hat. With its much hyped and attacked BlueCurve interface and various other improvements, will 8 be the Shadowman's ticket to victory in the OfB challenge?

The newest version of QNX Photon microGUI will enable multi-layered graphical interfaces which allows embedded developers to create sophisticated GUIs that display a mix of static and dynamic content. The multi-layer support will be available in the latest rollout of QNX Neutrino RTOS.

"We all know who makes the world's most popular desktop OS. With a greater than 90 percent market share, Microsoft's status is clear. But what's not so clear is: Who's number two? Of the contenders, Mac OS and Linux, which one is leading?" Read the editorial at OSOpinion.

The GNOME Foundation has entered into an agreement with Bitstream who will donate ten high quality fonts to be used with free software (KDE, XFree86, Gnome as well as others). This means distributions can finally ship free desktops/applications with a set of high quality fonts. On other X11 news, XFree86 4.2.99.4 snapshot (4.3 beta) is available for testing.

I had been trying to find a means to write a new Operating System since 1997 and back then an Mphil/Dphil at the Universities seemed realistic. I had assessed a variety of institutions and made applications were relevant but nothing was doing. It was then that I realised that I had to do it myself so my plan was to quickly develop a standard Kernel to start the business and allow me to focus on innovation.

SCO Group has hired high-profile attorney David Boies to see whether Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and versions of BSD infringe on Unix intellectual property the company owns.

The long-awaited port of HP's OpenVMS to Intel's Itanium is set for full release next year, as are plans to move Tru64 Unix features into HP-UX. The announcements came as HP introduced its new Alpha servers, based on the EV7 chip, plus a strategy to migrate Alpha users to Itanium servers over the next three to eight years.Plans are to sell new Alpha systems through 2006 and support them through 2011.

We spoke with Bill Moffitt, Product Line Manager for Solaris at Sun Microsystems. The second update to Solaris, called Solaris 9 12/02, was released this month. (Sun puts the month and year of the release date after the version number. Apparently, it was "released" in December, but don't ask why it was only made available a few days ago). In addition to bug fixes and updates that you would expect in a release like this, Sun has included a couple of big extras for capability and performance.

Mono 0.19 is released. Release notes, screenshots. GTK# 0.7 is also released.

In the first part of this series, Andrew D. Balsa looked at Mandrake Linux 9.1 and its initial beta release. Despite quite a few critical bugs, he was impressed with the progress and most charmed by the new KDE 3.1. When Mandrake released the second beta, he rushed to do another installation and these are his experiences, together with some impressive new screenshots.

An article in Baseline covers the increasing reliance that everyday appliances have on complex software, and the potentially disastrous results when that software fails. One prominent example of this is the BMW 745i, which has a sort of uber-control joystick that controls a WindowsCE-based system. This system was so buggy that BMW has done two recalls. The software was too ambitious and too poorly tested, so things like the brake lights not working and the units suddenly changing to metric are the result.

Earlier this week, Apple seeded pre-release versions of the v10.2.4 update to Mac OS X, both client and server. Both seeds of 10.2.4, known internally as "Jaguar Pink," were numbered build 6I13. Apple also has been writing drivers for a number of popular sound and video cards. With the release of 10.2.3, support was added for SoundBlaster Extigy, and as of last month, work was nearly complete on Audigy and Audigy 2 drivers. As for video cards, Apple is planning to support several workstation-quality graphics cards in 10.3, that weren't previously supported, including full support for NVidia Quadro 980, 900, and 750XGL. Support will also be added for ATI's top-end Fire GL series.

A ZDNet article covering the opening of the Linux World trade show also has a thorough "state of Linux business" overview. Some highlights: Big firms like HP, IBM, and Microsoft(!) will have a big presence; it seems like Linux willl continue its rapid rise in adoption, though it will still be difficult for firms to make the huge profits that companies like Microsoft have made because Linux resists lock-in; enterprise software vendors like BEA will continue to support Linux; and hardware vendors are embracing it more.